NASA Postdoctoral Program - Nonlinear Dynamical Approach to the Study of Algorithm Development in Computational Fluid Dynamics

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific opportunity focuses on long-term basic research integrating nonlinear dynamics, bifurcation theory, and chaotic dynamics with computational physics and computational sciences. The research aims to improve understanding of numerical uncertainties and construct advanced algorithms for practical aeroscience and astrobiology computations, using concepts from nonlinear dynamical systems theory to guide the development of temporally and spatially adaptive numerical schemes. The work addresses flow problems in NASA's Access to Space program, Deep Space Exploration, High Performance Computing and Communications, Planetary and Atmospheric Sciences, and the Computational Astrobiology Initiative, with specific topics including combustion, nonequilibrium reacting flow, high-speed shock-boundary-layer interactions, and direct numerical simulation of turbulent flows.